


Lost and Found

by fantasyseal



Category: Princess Tutu
Genre: Memory Loss, Multi, Older Characters, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-07
Updated: 2016-10-13
Packaged: 2018-08-20 01:52:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8232007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fantasyseal/pseuds/fantasyseal
Summary: Fakir's been trying to write Ahiru back for ten years.It's never worked.





	1. Lost

Gold Crown Academy is gone.

Its current classes graduated, it stopped taking in new students, and gradually, everyone moved away from the town.

Even Fakir is gone.

He returns, once a year, every year, to see Mytho and Rue, who cover him in hugs and assure him that they’re happy and offer to take him back with them, and he always gently refuses. He’s had enough of their fairytale story realm to last the rest of his life.

Every year, he stops to lift the old gray cat onto his lap, and pet his head, and tell him of a time when he was the cat’s student, and the cat taught him about love, and how to dance. The cat always listens attentively, bumping his head for more pats, and jumping down when he finishes.

Every year, he searches the lake for a little yellow duck with an ahoge, and every year he finds nothing.

Every year, he writes a story in which Ahiru turns up at his doorstep the next morning, shining and angry and shouting at him for taking so long, and every year he delays leaving as long as he can and listens at the door for the sound of her voice.

Pike and Lilie live next door to him. They’ve both long since grown out of the brats they were in school, and the two of them have fond memories of Ahiru, even more so after Fakir explained who she was and what she did. (Lilie had erupted in tears and would not be consoled for the next half hour.)

Autor lives in their little town library. He seems content, and brings Fakir books to read when they haven’t been checked out in too long. He knows the day Fakir comes back from his trip, and always waits outside the library for his return.

Fakir writes for a living. Nothing he writes has come true since the last raven battle, and Fakir would wonder if magic was still in the world at all if Mytho and Rue didn’t make a point of seeing him every year. Autor helps him translate his works into English, and he makes enough to live on.

None of them dance anymore. Fakir’s too-small shoes rest in his closet gathering dust. Pike and Lilie shrug when asked and say they were never much good. Mytho and Rue just shake their heads and smile.

Ten years on, a ballet company comes to their little town, and Pike and Lilie drag him into going, despite his protests about third-wheeling (the two of them are _nauseatingly_ affectionate). “It’ll be good for you to get out of the house, Fakir!” Lilie singsongs, and well, Fakir can’t really argue with that.

So he pays for a ticket, sits to Pike’s left, and sits down to watch the show, which is a rendition of _Cinderella_ (he quietly thanks whatever universal force drives his life in Drosselmeyer’s absence that it isn’t Swan Lake), and flips through the program before it starts, and freezes.

There, on the cast page, he’s _sure…_ he checks the name, and there she is. _Mizuno Ahiru as Cinderella._ Pike and Lilie have noticed, too, they’re whispering, and Fakir elbows them. “Shhh, we’ll get kicked out.”

“But—“ Lilie starts to protest, and Fakir shakes his head.

“It isn’t her, Lilie, she’s a duck.” She’s probably dead by now, if he’s perfectly honest with himself; ducks don’t live nearly as long as humans, but he can’t tell Lilie that or she’ll burst into tears. “She was born a duck and the only thing keeping her human was that brooch she wore.”

“But…” Lilie gestures. “It’s just _like_ her. Or what she’d look like if she’d grown up with us.” Pike’s staring at the stage, purple eyes wide, and a moment later she springs to her feet and runs onstage.

“PIKE!” Lilie runs after her, and Fakir finds himself following, calling frantically after them to _stop that_ , and then he sees what Pike saw.

She’s grown, nearly Fakir’s own height now, and in a full costume for Cinderella, hair gathered back, but not even professionals can tame her ahoge, it seems, and it springs up defiant as ever. The freckles are still scattered across her face, her eyes are wide and blue as ever, and it _is_ her, Fakir’s sure of it. Pike and Lilie slam to a halt and ask “Ahiru??” in perfect unison.

She steps back. “Eeeh, that’s me, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait until after the performance to get autographs…”

Pike’s face falls. “Ahiru, it’s us! Pike and Lilie!”

“We went to Gold Crown Academy together!” Lilie adds, pulling her hair up into pigtails. “Remember?”

The expression on Ahiru’s face goes from mild confusion to perfectly neutral. “I’ve never been to anywhere called Gold Crown,” the ballerina says quietly, “and I think you two had best get back to your seats. I’ll happily sign your program once the performance is over.”

Fakir stops dead in front of the stage, and seeing the heartbroken looks on their faces, offers a hand to help them off. Lilie’s shoulders are shaking as they walk to their seats. “That _is_ her, Pike…”

“I know,” Pike says, stroking her back. “I know, Lilie.” She looks up at Fakir, who’s walking along with his best stony face on, the one he used on Ahiru to keep her away from Mytho, and uses her free hand to punch him. “Stop that.”

“Ow!”

“Stop pretending you’re not feeling anything. That was _Ahiru,_ and nothing’s helped by you turning into a rock because you don’t feel like dealing with it,” Pike snaps as she helps Lilie take her seat.

The ballet is beautiful. Ahiru dances as well now as she ever did when she was Princess Tutu, gliding across the stage, and none of the three of them enjoy a moment of it. They race to the side door the instant the dancers finish their bow to the audience, though Fakir has no idea why. Ahiru doesn’t remember them; where’s the point?

But he waits with Pike and Lilie regardless, greeting the dancers politely as they come out and telling them they did an excellent job. Ahiru still hasn’t come out, and not that Fakir’s been counting the exact number of dancers or anything, but they’re definitely almost all gone.

And then she comes out, dressed in a perfectly normal jeans and t-shirt and tennis shoes and hair that’s no longer than Tutu’s was. Fakir wonders idly when she cut off her duck tail.

_Right. Because that’s the most important question here._

She comes up to Pike, Lilie, and Fakir with a polite smile on her face and a pen. “Ah, it’s you girls…”

“We want to apologize to you for earlier,” Lilie interrupts, and Ahiru blinks.

“It’s fine, I get that sort of thing a lot…”

Lilie brings out an old drawing, the one a girl at Gold Crown Academy had drawn of Ahiru. It’s the only picture they have of her, and the original is in a safe-deposit box; Lilie must have copied it at some point. Fakir had never realized she carried it around. She holds it up. “This is our Ahiru. I’m sorry we disturbed you, you just…really do look like her.”

Ahiru’s eyes soften as Lilie holds it up. “An old classmate?”

Lilie nods. “She was a ballet student with us at Gold Crown, before it closed. We…uh…we lost touch.” Fakir pretends his shoes are fascinating; this Ahiru has the same concerned look on her face that little yellow duck who found him when he was crying did.

“I’m sorry,” Ahiru says. “I don’t remember my childhood too well, but Gold Crown doesn’t sound familiar at all.”

“You’d remember.” Fakir is still talking to his shoes, but he can feel their attention swing toward him. “Gold Crown is hard to forget.”

“Why did it close?” Ahiru asks.

_Oh, the town rejoined modern civilization where the idea of a school where kids do nothing but study ballet all day was somewhat outdated, and it was all because of a ridiculously stubborn little duck who broke the story._

Partial truth, then. Fakir won’t outright lie to Ahiru, not even an Ahiru who has no idea who he is. “Its ideas were outdated, and most parents wanted their kids to have a more rounded education.”

“Just because it focused on ballet?” Ahiru stomps her foot, and Fakir looks up in surprise. That’s something he would expect out of the passionate girl he remembers, but this Ahiru is an adult, and he supposes he would have thought she’d grow out of her old habits. “That’s awful!”

“It wasn’t just ballet,” Pike says quietly. “There was an arts school, and a music school. And a little town, with a Why-Why Bridge, and a restaurant, and dances around the fire…”

“And a library,” Lilie adds, and laughs. “And a prince…” Fakir could _kill_ her for bringing Mytho into this.

“A prince?”

“They mean Mytho,” Fakir cuts in. “My brother.” True enough. Even if Mytho’s not related to him, they grew up together, and that’s close enough, isn’t it? “He was at Gold Crown with us. He and his girlfriend were called a prince and a princess because of what a perfect couple they made.”

“Mytho and…Rue-chan?” Ahiru’s eyes widen, and Fakir looks up.

“That’s what Ahiru always called her. ‘Rue-chan’.” Ahiru’s frowning, and Fakir has to look away to stop him comparing this perfect stranger to his Ahiru, but he can’t stop himself from asking. “How did you know that?”

“I…” She shakes her head. “I don’t _know._ But Rue-chan and Mytho sound like I should…” She points at him. “You. What’s your name.”

Fakir should tell her, but he wonders… “You don’t know?”

There’s that foot stomp again. “Would I _ask_ if I did, Fakir?”

Pike snorts, and Ahiru blinks. “Why do I know your name?”

Fakir’s trying to choose his words carefully. Not a word about Princess Tutu. Not a word about Drosselmeyer. Not a word about lakes, or glowing red pendants, or little yellow ducks who came to comfort him when he needed it. “We were friends, once. Pike and Lilie’s too.”

Ahiru folds her arms. “Why don’t I take us to lunch, and you can tell me all about it?”

“…You believe us?”

“Do I have a reason not to?” she asks. “I have names in my head I don’t have any faces for. Pike, Lilie, Rue-chan, Mytho, Fakir…who is Cat-sensei?”

Pike snorts. “Long story.”

“I have time.” She gestures to the parking lot. “Come on, I can see this is going to take a while. Best told over food.”

 

They go out and eat, and once their food arrives, Ahiru leans forward. “So. I believe you owe me a story.”

 _More of a very long nightmare._ Fakir’s trying to decide how much to tell her, and Pike saves him the trouble. “You won’t believe us.”

“Try me.” She’s got her hands propped on her chin, huge blue eyes fixed on the three of them.

“We had a cat for a ballet teacher.” That’s Lilie, blunt as ever. “That’s Cat-sensei.”

Ahiru taps her fingers on the table, and Pike shrugs. “We did warn you.”

“You could be lying to me, but I get the feeling you wouldn’t,” Ahiru says. “Go ahead. _Tell me._ ” There’s something of Fakir’s Ahiru in her voice, that angry _tone_ she used to use when she was shouting at Fakir.

Fakir closes his eyes. “Once upon a time, there was a duck…”

“That’s not funny!”

“It’s not supposed to be. Once upon a time, there was a duck. This duck watched a prince dancing on the shore of her lake, and fell in love. She wanted nothing more than to be with the prince, and so when a man offered her the chance to join his story, she eagerly agreed.

“The duck forgot her identity, for a time, and lived as Ahiru, a good-natured and kind ballet student at Gold Crown Academy, but when her prince was in danger, she was forced to act. Ahiru became Princess Tutu, a beautiful ballerina, and saved her prince for the first time…”

Fakir can still recall the story as clearly as if it happened yesterday, and narrates it again as best he can, letting Pike and Lilie fill in spots, like Ahiru’s despairing spell (induced over realizing she was hurting Mytho, not due to her crush, they’d realized). They couldn’t tell her everything, but they did their best.

Fakir tells the story of a girl who wouldn’t call Princess Kraehe anything but ‘Rue-chan’, the story of a beautiful ballerina who accepted her fate and returned the prince’s heart anyway, the story of a brave duck who kept dancing even when she was exhausted.

He leaves out none of his own part, admitting freely to his deeds (in hindsight, his actions might not have been the absolute best path) and in their turn Pike and Lilie admit they hadn’t been the greatest friends. Ahiru listens to them attentively, giving no sign of disbelief, even when Fakir ends it with Mytho and Rue flying off and Ahiru returning to the lake.

"And I suppose you would know the rest better than I would,” Fakir finishes. “I never found Ahiru again.” He leaves out the minor detail of traveling back every year to look.

Ahiru closes her eyes. “I should be dismissing you three as insane and running away. But…I suppose if you are, so am I. Everything you told me makes sense. Just a duck, am I?”

“Much more than that,” Fakir says quietly.

“A duck, a girl, and a ballerina.” She laughs. “I wish I remembered it.”

“Do you want to go?” Pike asks, and Ahiru blinks.

“What?”

“Do you want to go to Gold Crown? The school’s gone, and the town’s abandoned, but the buildings were built to last, and they’re still there. Rue and Mytho have a system set up to tell them when we come.” Fakir shoots her a grateful glance for using ‘we’ and not ‘Fakir’, and she smiles back at him. _Don’t give it a thought, Fakir. You always were an idiot._

Ahiru only thinks for a second. “Yes. Where is it?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I know no one cares about Princess Tutu anymore...  
> But I do love this show, and apparently it's a rite of passage or something to write a return-of-Ahiru story, and it just kind of happened.  
> The ending's giving me fits, so the next chapter will be up approximately either when I'm happier with it or when I give up.


	2. Found

Gold Crown Town is within a two-hour drive.

The once-impenetrable walls are gone, but the buildings themselves stand tall, and the lake is as calm and clear as ever. Ahiru asks what everything is, bouncing along with _way_ too much energy for a ballerina who just went through an entire recital.

“What’s that?”

“That’s the old town square.”

“What’s that?”

“I think they used to sell bread.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the Why-Why Bridge.”

“What’s that?” Ahiru’s pointing at a silver bell.

“That’s how I call Mytho and Rue.” He frowns. “Pike, Lilie…” They understand, thank goodness, and shepherd Ahiru away, promising they can come back and talk to Mytho and Rue-chan and wouldn’t she like to see where she stayed at Gold Crown?

Fakir relaxes. Ahiru was as important to the two of them as she was to Fakir, Pike, and Lilie, and he doesn’t want to shock them. If they’ll even come so soon after his last visit…

He rings the bell and sits down to wait, worrying. What if Mytho and Rue don’t hear it? What if they hear it and don’t come? What if Ahiru decides he really is lying and leaves? What if…

He’s cut off in his train of what-ifs by Mytho and Rue’s chariot landing. “Fakir!” Mytho calls, and turns back to Rue. “I _told you_ it was him!”

Rue flaps a hand at Mytho and races toward him. “Fakir, what’s wrong? What are you doing back so soon?” Mytho follows, and both of them don’t so much hug as actually tackle him.

“Can’t breathe…” Fakir mumbles, and they let go reluctantly. _How can I break this to them?_

He straightens up. “We…we found Ahiru.” Rue’s eyes widen, and she looks behind him, like Ahiru might be hiding.

“Where?” Mytho asks.

“With Pike and Lilie, but she…” He doesn’t know how to explain this. “She doesn’t remember. Not being a duck, not Princess Tutu, and not going to school here.” He laughs. “We would have lost her again if Pike hadn’t mentioned you two. She remembers Mytho and ‘Rue-chan’.”

Rue laughs. “She _would._ She was always so insistent on the -chan.”

Fakir turns and gives a piercing whistle, and a moment later Pike and Lilie run into view, bringing Ahiru with them, who’s protesting about something.

“AHIRU!” Mytho and Rue nearly deafen Fakir with their yell, and Ahiru jumps and looks up.

“I told you, she doesn’t _remember_ you,” Fakir hisses. “ _Gentle._ ”

Mytho looks back at him. “If you think we wouldn’t be gentle with Ahiru, we need to start visiting you more often.” Fakir doesn’t have a good reply to that, and now Ahiru’s walking up, flanked by Pike and Lilie.

“Are you Mytho and Rue-chan?” Rue stifles a laugh.

“That’s us,” Mytho responds, around Rue’s laughter.

“What?” Ahiru demands of Rue, stomping her foot and looking so much like their Ahiru that Fakir barely holds in a laugh of his own.

Rue takes a deep breath and contains her laughter. “Fakir says you don’t remember, but the first time we really talked, I told you to call me Rue-sama. I know,” she adds when Ahiru raises a hand and opens her mouth, “conceited. You thought so then, too.” She braids her hair back into a duck tail and makes her voice scratchy. “‘Rue-saaaaaah-maaaa’.”

Ahiru laughs. “Did I really?”

Rue nods. “You told me that we were looking for Mytho together, and we’d been talking all this time, and so it was _Rue-chan!_ ” She’s smiling at the memory. “You were an opinionated person. Never one to stay quiet. You were always in Fakir’s face, too.”

“ _Rue!”_ Fakir protests, and Rue smirks.

“She was! Both as Princess Tutu and as Ahiru. Did he tell you he thought _I_ was Princess Tutu? He never even suspected you until you practically transformed in front of him.”

Ahiru’s laughing now. “He left that out…”

“I bet he did,” Rue says, still smirking, and Fakir gives them both a death glare.

“When did you two start teaming up? Mytho, help me!”

Mytho’s just watching in amusement. “As a ruler, I don’t consider it appropriate to get involved in petty squabbles…”

Fakir reaches out and smacks his shoulder. “ _Mytho!”_

Ahiru’s laughing, still, and Rue and Mytho look five years younger, and Pike and Lilie are giggling like schoolkids.

So Fakir lets himself smile, and Rue points at him. “Ah ha! He lives!”

“What?”

“I haven’t seen you smile in years,” Mytho informs him. “We weren’t sure you remembered how.” Fakir would argue, but they’re right, and so he settles for Ahiru’s old method of winning a fight by sticking his tongue out.

“I don’t believe I’m being lectured on emotions by the man who had to have a _magical ballerina put his heart back together.”_

“See, this is why _I’m_ the politician, and you aren’t. Tact exists, Fakir,” Mytho says, ignoring his Princess Tutu comment.

Rue rolls her eyes. “Please. Don’t believe him, Ahiru, he delegated all the boring political stuff after the third time his idea of diplomacy nearly got us into an inter-kingdom crisis.” Ahiru laughs again.

He’s sure that any minute, he’s going to wake up and find Ahiru gone. It’s too easy, to have Ahiru just walk back into his life, accept who she once was, and be here at Gold Crown laughing on the grass with Rue and Mytho. Could he be imagining all this?

In case he is, he stares at Ahiru, trying to commit her to memory, until she looks back and asks, “What’s wrong?”

“He’s an idiot,” Lilie informs her, “and he thinks this is a dream and he’s going to wake up.”

Pike reaches over and hits him again. “There. See? Not a dream!”

“ _Ow!”_

Ahiru smiles. “I’m real. At least I think I am.” She leans back and looks up at the sky. “Thank you, all of you.”

“What, for dragging you out here?” Pike asks.

“No. For telling me who I am.”

“You must have known,” Mytho says. “You’re a dancer, Fakir said.”

Ahiru nods. “The earliest thing I remember is being taken in by a school of dance. Well…I woke up on the doorstep of the school, actually.” She’s still watching the clouds.

“The instructor who found me set me next to a barre, just to see if I could dance at all, and I was hardly spectacular, but I obviously wasn’t a novice. I won a scholarship to that school, and I stayed there, learned how to dance.” She laughs. “I picked it up so fast…I loved it.”

They’re all listening, and Ahiru sits back up. “That instructor named me Ahiru. Said my voice was so much like a duck’s that I might as well have a name to match, and then ‘Mizuno’ because it was raining that night. I stayed there, and I joined a company, and now we travel around and dance. Not as interesting as yours, I’m afraid…”

Pike ruffles her hair. “Like you could ever be boring, Ahiru-chan.” She has to reach up to do it, and scowls. “When did you get so _tall?_ ”

“She’s shorter than Fakir,” Lilie points out. “She can’t be more than 165cm.”

Pike, who is all of 152cm, mutters, “That _is_ tall.”

“I do have to ask,” Mytho says, “Ahiru, do you wear any kind of jewelry? Fakir might have told you, but before, what sustained your form was a piece of my heart.”

Ahiru stares. “I don’t think I’m going to get used to you discussing your shattered heart like ‘oh, there’s a cloud up there, I think it might rain later’.” Rue lets out an unladylike snort at that, and Mytho laughs.

“With enough distance, it’s easier to talk about. But now my heart’s back, where it belongs, and I’m curious if something else is making it possible for you to be here.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t have any jewelry that I wear constantly.” She looks at Fakir. “You mentioned that I could turn back and forth from a duck to a girl. How?”

Fakir closes his eyes and thinks back. “You quacked. Or you took your pendant off.”

“Really?” she says, raising an eyebrow. “Well, then.” She stands, and calls, “QUACK!” to the sky.

Nothing. No magical red twinkles, no collapsing clothing. She’s just standing there listening to the echoes of her shout.

“Not the same, then,” Rue observes. She looks at Fakir. “You’ll tell us if you work this out after we leave?”

“Of course.”

They stay a while longer, talking with Mytho and Rue, before they have to go home, and Fakir bundles everyone into the car. Rue and Mytho hug them all about a thousand times and make them promise to come back _“sooner than a year, Fakir!”_

Ahiru’s asleep by the time they get back, and Fakir pulls up in front of the theater, feeling pretty silly—he doesn’t know where else to take her, so he shakes her shoulder. “Ahiru?”

She blinks awake. “Whaaaa?”

“Where are you staying?” He gestures at the theater. “I came back here, but you don’t live here, right?”

Ahiru yawns. “By the library, I think.” She promptly falls back asleep, and Fakir sighs. At least he knows where that is.

Pike and Lilie are sleeping with Lilie on Pike’s shoulder, and Fakir wakes the two of them up long enough to get them into their house (he locks the door behind them with his copy of their key), and drives to the hotel next to the library.

“Ahiru, we’re here.” Ahiru mutters something that sounds rude, but she does wake up, and Fakir walks her into the hotel. The front desk is happy to call down another dancer from her company to help her find her room, and Fakir is trying his best to restrain himself, but he has to know.

“Ahiru, are you leaving again?”

Ahiru smiles and shakes her head. “After today? Not on your life.” She laughs. “My understudy’s a better Cinderella than I am, anyway, and I’m getting too old to twirl around a stage all day…” She lets herself be tugged away by a scolding girl, waving goodbye, and Fakir raises one hand to return the wave.

_Ahiru’s staying. Ahiru isn’t going away._

It’s late, but he goes to the library. He knows Autor’s mostly nocturnal, anyway, and sure enough there he is, curled on the couch with a book and a cup of hot chocolate. Fakir knocks, and Autor looks up. “There you are. Where’ve you been all day?”

“Gold Crown.” Fakir perches on one of Autor’s chairs (one of the few not covered in books; Autor’s idea of organizing starts and ends at ‘precarious piles of books everywhere’). “We found Ahiru.”

Autor sits up. “What? How? _Where?_ ” Fakir holds up his hands in surrender, and Autor laughs. “Sorry.”

Fakir tells him, and by the end of it Autor has a strange expression on his face. “What?”

Autor doesn’t answer; just goes to his old piano and pulls a sheaf of sheet music out from the bench and offers it to Fakir without a word. Fakir takes it; he’s always been utterly awful at reading music, but he doesn’t have to to see the title.

“‘Morning Grace?’” he asks. “Autor, did you write this?”

“That first year,” Autor says, sitting down on his piano bench. “The first time you went back to Mytho and Rue. Pike and Lilie came to talk to me. I’d never known Ahiru that well,” he adds. “Different divisions, and you know she’d make friends with a snake if it’d stop long enough, but I wasn’t like that…”

Fakir privately thinks that might be understating it slightly; Autor had been something of an ass in school, but he’d been no better, so he just waits.

“They came and told me the whole story.” He laughs. “Did you know, she never got her pointe shoes? They only had one lesson with them before everything…happened, and she wasn’t allowed to participate.” Fakir remembers Princess Tutu, en pointe like it was nothing. He’d known Ahiru the girl wasn’t a good dancer, of course, making Princess Tutu’s grace another of Drosselmeyer’s little jokes, but he had missed that first pointe lesson. He’d missed a _lot_ of lessons.

“So they told me,” Autor says. “About Princess Tutu, everything you hadn’t had time to tell me. About Ahiru, about her dancing, and I wrote this.” He taps the sheet music. “It was already in my head, after that last battle, I just…needed to write it down. I was hoping, all that time, you were going to come home with Ahiru by your side, and she was going to shout us all down for ever doubting her. That you were going to find a way to trick the ending.” He laughs.

“Well, you did. Just ten years later…”

“ _You_ wrote her back?” Fakir asks.

“Seems so.” Autor takes back his sheet music. “…Though I suppose I missed the mark by a bit.” He sits back down, and starts playing before Fakir can argue.

It’s a simple melody, calm and quiet. It sounds like something Fakir, Ahiru, Mytho, and Rue might all have practiced together to back at Gold Crown, and it _shouldn’t_ fit Ahiru and her loud, chirpy, orange-haired self at all, but it does.

Autor finishes and looks at Fakir. “I didn’t…” He’s cut off by a hug from Fakir. “…Fakir. Can’t breathe.”

“Sorry,” Fakir says, letting go. “You…you really brought her back, didn’t you.”

“I think so,” Autor says softly. “I’m sorry about her memory. I don’t think I can fix it; I don’t even know what I did the first time, let alone how to replicate it.”

Fakir laughs. “Ahiru’s _home,_ Autor. That’s enough.” Autor finally smiles, and his shoulders relax.

Ahiru’s home, and Fakir feels like time has unfrozen again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I originally had him just writing her back, but that felt wrong, and then I remembered that Autor was a music student, and he plays piano, and...then he wrote Morning Grace. Hopefully his character feels okay...(that goes for everyone, actually, figuring out how to write their banter nearly killed me. Especially Mytho. Would it have killed them to give us some more time with Mytho-with-emotions?)  
> Thank you for reading! :D


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